II
THAT the Young Doctor bought himself a new blue serge suit for Saturday was no indication whatsoever that he looked forward to that day with any pleasurable anticipation. Lots of people "doll-up" for disaster who couldn't even be hired to brush their hair for joy.
Quite frankly if anybody had asked him about it, the Young Doctor would have rated Mrs. Tome Gallien as a disaster.
If pressed further for justification of such a rating he would have argued that any rich woman who couldn't sleep was a disaster!
"Oh, it's all well enough for poor people," he would have admitted, "to put in the long night watches mulling over the weird things that they'd like to do. But when a person is actually able to leap up at the first gay crack of dawn and finance the weirdest fancy of his night!
"Oh, of course," he was honest enough to 80acknowledge. "Poor Mrs. Tome Gallien would never again while life lasted be able to 'leap up' at any hour of the day or night! And she doubtless in her fifty eccentric years had given extravagantly to no end of people who had proved themselves the stingiest sort of receivers! And her sense of humor even in her remotest, happiest youth must have been of course essentially caustic!
"But how any woman could reach a point so sick, so vindictive, so caustic, so rich, that still unable to strip herself of her lifelong passion for giving she should evolve the perfectly diabolic idea of giving people only the things that they didn't want—only the things, indeed, that she was absolutely positive they didn't want? Such as pianos! Grand pianos! Huge rosewood chunks of intricate mechanism and ornate decoration and Heaven knows what expense—crammed down into the meager crowded office of some poor struggling young doctor who didn't know a note from a gnat! Himself of course being the young doctor!
"Thought it was funny, did she? Thought it would really drive him outdoors for sheer 81 rage into some sort of an enlivening adventure? That was her theory, was it? Well it was funny. And it had driven him out to meet a rather particularly enlivening sort of adventure! Which adventure in the person of a Miss Solvei Kjelland was now due at his office by her own insistent appointment, on Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. But this Miss Solvei Kjelland, it seems, was not the Adventure which Mrs. Tome Gallien had already arranged for him for Saturday afternoon, same hour, same place?"
Into his muddled mind flashed transiently a half-forgotten line of a novel to the effect: "Heaven help the day when the mate you made for yourself and the mate God made for you happen to meet!"
"Well, if it really came to a show-down between his Adventure and Mrs. Tome Gallien's?"
Quite unexpectedly his mouth began suddenly to twitch at one corner. Speaking of "caustic humor" it was barely possible that the Young Doctor had just a tiny bit of caustic humor himself. When a man smiles suddenly on one side of his mouth it is proof at least 82that he sees the joke. Nobody ought to be expected to smile on both sides till he feels the joke as well as sees it.
Certainly the poor Young Doctor was not feeling very much of anything at just this time except a sense of impending doom.
But in this sense of impending doom flickered the one ray of light that at least he knew what his own Adventure was: she was young, lithe, blonde, why as tall as himself, almost! A trifle unconventional, perhaps? Yes, even a good bit amazing! But thoroughly wholesome! And human? Yes that was just it, so deliciously and indisputably human!
But Mrs. Tome Gallien's Adventure? A woman like Mrs. Tome Gallien wouldn't stop at anything! It might be a pair of llamas from Peru! Or a greasy witchy-gypsy to tell his fortune! Or a homeless little jet-black pickaninny with a banjo and—consumption! Or—or an invitation even to lecture on physiology at a girls school! But whatever it proved to be he might just as well realize now that it would be something that he hated. Mrs. Tome Gallien in her present mood would certainly never seek to lull him with a "glad" 83as long as she saw any possible chance to rouse him with a "mad"!
"Well, he wouldn't get mad yet, anyway!" he promised himself with unwonted whimsicality. "And if it was llamas—which perhaps on the whole would be his preference out of the various possibilities anticipated—they would at least, judging from the woolly pictures in the geographies, be free from any possible danger of barking their shins against the sharper edges of the piano. Whereas a committee of any size come to request a series of lectures on——"
Thus with one form or another of light mental exercise did he try to keep his brain clear and his pulse normal for the approaching Saturday.
But Saturday itself dawned neither clear nor normal. Rain, snow, slush, wind, had changed the whole outdoor world into a blizzard.
It was one of those days when anything might blow in. But how in the world would it ever blow out again? With this threat of eternity added to uncertainty the Young Doctor decided quite impulsively to dust his desk, and investigate his ice- chest. To his infinite 84relief he found at least very little food in the ice-chest. Whatever happened it could not possibly prove a very long siege! A half pound of butter, a box of rusks, a can of coffee, six or seven eggs, divided up among any kind of a committee, or even between two llamas? At the increasing excitability of his fancies he determined very suddenly to sober himself with hard reading.
With this intent, as soon as he had finished his breakfast he took down from his bookcase a very erudite treatise on "The Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint" and proceeded to devote himself to it. "Now here was something serious. Thoroughly serious. Science! Heaven be praised for Science!"
By noon, indeed, he was so absorbed in "The Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint" that he quite forgot about luncheon. And at three o'clock he looked down with a glance of surprise to see that the toes of his boots were dipping into a tiny rivulet which seemed flowing to him from the farther side of the room. By craning his neck around the corner of the piano he noted with 85increasing astonishment that the rivulet sprang essentially from the black ferule of an umbrella, and that just beyond the dripping black ferule of that umbrella was the dripping black ferule of another umbrella, and beyond that, still an other!
Jumping joyously to his feet he made three apologies in one to the group that loomed up before him.
"Why, I beg your pardon," he began to the wheezy old man who sat nearest him. "Really I—I—had no idea," he explained painstakingly to the small freckled boy just beyond. "With all this wind and everything—and the way the rain rattles against the window," he stammered to the crape-swathed woman in the far corner. None of these was presumably Mrs. Tome Gallien's Adventure, but it was surely adventure enough of itself on the old oak settle, where almost no one ever sat even on pleasant days, to behold three patients sitting crowded—and in a blizzard! "I was so absorbed in my book!" he boasted with sudden nonchalance.
"Oh, that's all right, sir," wheezed the Old Man. "I was just waitin' for a car. And it looked drier in here than where I was standin' outdoors." 86
By craning his neck around the corner of the piano, he noted with increasing astonishment that the rivulet sprang from the black ferule of an umbrella
And "Say, Mister, do you pull teeth?" questioned the small freckled boy.
But the Crape-Swathed Lady was a real patient. Though goodness knows the Young Doctor would gladly have drawn either the old man or the small boy in her place. All his life long he had particularly disapproved of "mourning." It was false, spiritually, he thought. It was bad, psychologically. Everybody knew of course that it was unwise hygienically. But worst of anything perhaps the woman before him now made him think of a damp black cat.
It was perfectly evident, however, that the lady herself cherished no such unpleasant self-consciousness.
With perfect complacency at his request she came forward to the light, or at least to such light as the storm-lashed window allowed and, still swathed as blackly from view as any harem lady, stated her case.
"I have such a pain—here," she pointed with black-gloved hand toward her black-veiled face. 89
Did she also take him for a tooth puller? mused the Young Doctor. With all haste he sought to settle the matter at once. "If you will kindly remove your—er—bonnet—is it that you call it?" he asked.
Compliantly the unpleasant black-gloved hands busied themselves for a moment with pin or knot until emerging slowly from its dank black draperies there lifted at last to the Young Doctor's gasping stare the most exquisitely- featured, dreamy-eyed young brunette face that he had ever seen outside a Salon catalogue.
"Here! Just here is the pain!" pointed the black-gloved finger to a spot right in front of the most absurd little ear.
"Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint!" gasped the Young Doctor just like a swear. Even as scientifically as he touched the pain-spot he felt his own wrist wobble most unscientifically with the contact. It was no wonder perhaps that the dark eyes before him dilated with a vague sort of alarm.
"Is it—is it as bad as that?" faltered his patient.
"Why, it isn't that at all!" hastened the 90Young Doctor with a sudden resumption of sagacity. "It's probably just a sort of rheumatism. What made me cry out so was just a mere funny coincidence. This particular kind of pain being a subject that I—that I—if I may say so—have been giving rather special attention to lately."
"Oh, then I trust that I have come to just the right person," smiled the dark eyes with a kindling surface-sweetness that seemed nevertheless quite frankly bereft of any special inner enthusiasm.
"We will certainly hope so!" flushed the Young Doctor. "How about this pain—?" he began quite abruptly.
"It hurts me when I eat," said the girl. Her voice was very low and soft and drawling. "And when I drink. And when I talk," she confided. "But especially when I sing."
"Oh, you sing?" questioned the Young Doctor.
"Yes!" said the girl. For the first time her classic, immobile little face was quick with a very modern emotion.
"Personally," confessed the Young Doctor, "I should like very much to try a little 91experiment on you if you don't mind. It will help me, even if it hurts you."
"As you wish," acquiesced the girl with the same imperturbable little smile.
From his precipitous retreat into the other room he returned after due delay with a plate of rusks and a steaming hot cup of coffee.
"It's such a horrid day," he said. "And you look so wet and cold, perhaps a taste of coffee wouldn't come in altogether amiss. But it's these rusks that I'm really interested in. I want you to bite down hard on them. And then presently perhaps I will ask you to sing so that I may watch the—Oh, by the way," he interrupted himself irrelevantly. "I neglected, I think, to ask your name."
"My name," said the girl, "is Kendrue."
"What?" questioned the Young Doctor. "Why that is my name," he smiled.
"Yes, I know," murmured the girl. "Coincidences of that sort are certainly very strange. It was one of the first things my aunt spoke of when I asked her advice about what physician to go to. I am a comparative stranger in the city," she added a bit shiveringly. "But didn't my aunt tell you I was 92coming?" she quickened suddenly. "Didn't my aunt, Mrs. Tome Gallien, write you—or something—that I was coming?"
"Mrs. Tome Gallien?" jumped the Young Doctor. Chaotically through his senses quickened a dozen new angers, a dozen new resentments. A girl? So this was Mrs. Tome Gallien's threatened "Adventure," was it? Of all the spiteful possibilities in the world, now wasn't this just like the amiable lady in question to foist another girl into a situation quite sufficiently embarrassed with "girl" as it was! "Is—is Mrs. Tome Gallien your—aunt?" he demanded with such sudden stentorious sternness that even the most bona fide blood-relation would hardly have acquiesced without pausing an instant to reconsider the matter.
"Well, not of course, not exactly a real aunt," admitted the girl. "But I have always called her my aunt. We have always been very intimate. Or rather perhaps I should say she had always been very, very kind to me. And now, since my father—" With the unmistakable air of one who strives suddenly to suppress an almost overwhelming emotion she pointed irrelevantly to the piano and waved 93off the plate of rusks and the cup of coffee which the Young Doctor still stood proffering. "You must excuse me if I—if I—seem distrait," she stammered. "But in addition to the very real annoyance that this little pain in my jaw is giving me I am—I am so bewildered about that piano! Where did you get it?" she asked quite bluntly.
"Why it came from Such-and-Such warerooms I believe," admitted the Young Doctor with as much frankness as he could summon at the moment.
With a little soft sigh the girl reached out and touched the dark, gleaming woodwork.
"I thought so," she whispered. "And—oh, how you must love it! It is certainly the most beautiful instrument that I ever saw in my life! The most melodious, I mean! The most nearly perfect sounding-board! An utter miracle of tone and flexibility as an accompanist to the human voice!"
"U—m—mmmm," said the Young Doctor.
"For two months," persisted the girl, "I have been haunting the warerooms you speak of! For two months I have been moving 94 heaven and earth in an effort to possess it! But my means being temporarily tied up," she shivered again ever so slightly, "I was not able immediately to—" With that odd, inert little smile she reached out for the plate of rusks and took one as the Young Doctor had requested. "Yes, here is the pain," she explained conscientiously. "But only last week," she winced, "on my birthday it was! I had every reason in the world to believe that Mrs. Tome Gallien was going to give the piano to me! She has given me so many wonderful things! But she sent me instead the deed to a duck blind down somewhere on the South Carolina coast,—shooting, you know? And dreadful guns! And dogs! And all that! I, who wouldn't even hurt a sparrow, or scare a kitten!"
With his hands clapped to his head the Young Doctor swung around suddenly and started for the window.
"Was this a comic opera? A farce? A phantasy of not enough work and too much worry? Was every mention of Mrs. Tome Gallien's name to be a scream? As long as life lasted? As long as—?" Startled by a tiny gasp he turned to find his little visitor 95convulsed with tears but still struggling bravely to regain her self-possession. "Oh, please don't think I'm always as—as weak as this," she pleaded through her sobs. "But with pain and disappointment and everything happening so all at once. And with my big loss so recent——"
"How long ago did you lose your father?" asked the Young Doctor, very gently.
"My father?" stammered the girl. White now as the death she mourned she lifted her stricken face to his. "Why it wasn't father I was talking about," she gasped. "It was my husband."
"Your husband?" cried the Young Doctor. Two minutes ago was this the situation that he had cursed out as a farce, a comic opera? This poor, stricken, exquisite, heartbroken little widow, tagged out by Mrs. Tome Gallien as an "Adventure" and foisted on his attention like some gay new kind of a practical joke? It was outrageous! he fumed. "Inexcusably brutal!"
"Colorado—is where it happened," he had to bend his head to hear. "Almost a year and a half ago," strangled the poor little voice, 96"and we hadn't been married a year. Lung trouble it was, something dreadfully acute. Mrs. Tome Gallien did everything. She's always done everything. It's something about my father I think. Oh, ages and ages ago they were lovers it seems. But—but she chose to make a worldier marriage. And later, my father—why she bought my whole trousseau for me!" suffered the sweet voice afresh. "Went to Paris herself for it, I mean!"
Across the Young Doctor's memory a single chance sentence came flashing back "The daughter of a man who once meant something to me in my youth." So this was the girl? The little "Stingy Receiver"? Among all Mrs. Tome Gallien's so- called "stingy receivers" the one unquenchable pang in an otherwise reasonably callous side? Precious undoubtedly, poignant, eternally significant, yet always and forever the flesh that was not of her flesh nor the spirit quite of her spirit. Familiar eyes—perhaps? An alien mouth? A dimple that had no right, possibly, haunting a lean, loved cheek line? Fire, flame, ice, ashes? A torch to memory, a scorch 97to hope! But whose smile was it, anyway? That maddeningly casual and inconsequent little "Thank You" smile searing its way apparently with equal impartiality across chiffon or crape,— a proffered chair, or eagerest promise of relief from pain? Had Mrs. Tome Gallien's life, by chance, gone a-wreck on just that smile? And why in Heaven's name, if people loved each other, did they let anything wreck them? And back of that— what did people want to love each other for anyway? What good was it? All this old loving-and-parting-and-marrying-some- one-else fretting its new path now all over again into chiffon-and-crape! "Bony-Ankylosis-of-the-Temporomandibular- Joint!" At the very taste of the phrase his mind jumped out of its reverie and back to the one real question at hand. "If you please, now!" he implored his visitor. "Just a little of the coffee! Just a crunch or two of the rusk!" Urgently as he spoke he began proffering first one and then the other. "And this crying?" he persisted. "Does this also hurt you?"
From the doorway beyond him he sensed suddenly the low sound of footsteps and looked 98up into Solvei Kjelland's laughing face. Blue as a larkspur in a summer hail-storm, crisp, shimmery, sparkling with frost, even her blonde hair tucked into a larkspur-blue storm hat, she stood there shaking a reproachful finger at both the Young Doctor and his patient.
"Oh, Ho! For what a pity!" she laughed. "If you had but told me that Mrs. Tome Gallien's adventure was to be a picnic then I also could have brought the food!"
"Excuse me, Miss Kjelland," he said; "but this is not a picnic—it is a clinic"
"Picnic?" frowned the Young Doctor. Before the plaintive bewilderment in the dark eyes that lifted at just that instant to his an unwonted severity crisped into his voice. "Excuse me, Miss Kjelland," he said; "but this is not a picnic—it is a clinic."
"So? Who is a clinic?" cried Solvei Kjelland perfectly undaunted, and swished bluely forward to join them. "It is not of course of a propriety, Doctor Kendrue," she laughed, "that I should come thus without the sick aunt! But in a storm so unwholesome for aunt is it not best that I buy some good medicine?" In a shimmer of melting snowflakes she perched herself on the arm of the 101first chair she could reach, and extracting the familiar little purse from her big blue pocket handed the Young Doctor a one-dollar bill. "Medicine for the sick aunt!" she commandeered gaily. Then with only the most casual glance at the piano she whirled around to scrutinize the desolate little figure before her. If she noticed the tears she certainly gave no sign of it.
"Ah! It is as I thought!" she triumphed. "Most surely in my mind did I say that you would be a girl!" In one sweeping blue-eyed glance she seemed to be appraising suddenly every individual tone and feature of the dark, exquisite little face that lifted so bewilderedly to hers. Then quite unexpectedly a most twinkling smile flickered across her own sharply contrasted blondeness and like a fine friendly child she held out her hand in greeting. "Most certainly," she conceded, "you are more cute than I! But also in some ways," she beamed, "I am of course more cute than you!"
While the Young Doctor waited for the skies to fall, he saw instead, to his infinite amazement, that the little brunette though still bewildered was returning the handshake with 102unquestionable cordiality. "Awfully well-bred women were like that," he reasoned quickly. "No matter how totally disorganized they might be by silly things like mice or toads you simply couldn't faze them when it came to a purely social emergency." And in a situation which had thus precipitously reached a point so hopelessly non-professional there seemed after all but one thing left for him to do.
"Miss Kjelland!" he essayed with a really terrifying formality, "This is Mrs. Kendrue!" The instant the phrase had left his lips his very ears were crimsoning with the one possible implication which Miss Solvei Kjelland would draw from such an announcement, and more panic-stricken than any woman would have been with a mouse he turned and fled for his medicine cabinet in the very farthest corner of the room.
"Your wife?" faltered Solvei Kjelland in frank astonishment. "S—o?" she laughed. "And I have only just come! Mix me a quarter's worth more of the good medicine, Mr. Doctor!" she called back over her shoulder, and dropped down on the low stool 103at the other girl's feet. "Now about this piano!" she began precipitously.
"I am not Doctor Kendrue's wife!" protested the little black figure bewilderedly. "Why—why I thought you were his wife," she confided with increasing confusion.
From the direction of the medicine cabinet the sound of some one choking was distinctly audible. Both girls rose instinctively to meet—only the Young Doctor's perfectly inscrutable face.
"Who now is eating a Miss—mis-apprehension?" beamed Solvei.
"Mrs. Kendrue is a patient of mine," affirmed the Young Doctor with some coldness.
"O-h," conceded the Norse girl with equal coldness. "A patient? That is most nice. But—" As though suddenly muddled all over again by this latest biographical announcement she threw out her hands with a frank gesture of despair. "If this should be a patient," she implored, "who then is the 'Other Adventure'?"
Behind the little black figure's back the Young Doctor lifted a quick warning finger to his lips. 104
"S-s-h!" he signaled beseechingly to her.
On Solvei Kjelland's forehead the incongruous frown deepened from perplexity into something very like impatience.
"Well certainly," she attested. "You are of a great sobriety in your office, but most wild on the doorstep. As for me," she confided, "it is of the piano and the piano only that I care!"
"That's just it," said the Young Doctor, "it is of the piano and the piano only that Mrs. Kendrue cares!"
With her finger-tips already touching the ivory keys the Norse girl swung sharply around.
"What is that?" she demanded.
With a sudden impish conviction that Mrs. Tome Gallien, being already responsible for so many awkward situations in the world, might just as well now be responsible for everything, the Young Doctor gathered breath for his latest announcement.
"Mrs. Kendrue," he smiled with studied calm, "is the niece,— as it were, of the lady who gave me the piano." 105
"What," stammered both girls in a single breath.
But it was the little widow's turn this time to be the most dumfounded. "What," she repeated with a vague new sort of pain. "What? You mean that Mrs. Tome Gallien gave you the piano—when—when she knew how I had been longing for it all these months? Been haunting the warerooms day after day!" she explained plaintively over her black shoulder to the other girl. "Why—why do you love music so?" she demanded with sudden vehement passion of the Young Doctor. "Are you a real musician, I mean?"
"On the contrary," bowed the Young Doctor, "I am as tender- hearted about pianos as you are about ducks. Nothing under Heaven would induce me to lay my rough, desecrating hand upon a piano." In an impulse of common humanity he turned to allay the new bewilderment in Solvei Kjelland's face. "This allusion about ducks," he explained, "concerns another little idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Tome Gallien's."
"Yes!" quickened the little widow. "When she sent Doctor Kendrue this wonderful piano 106she sent me a—a dreadful duck blind—way down somewhere in South Carolina!"
"What is that?" puzzled Solvei Kjelland.
"Why a place to shoot!" snapped the Young Doctor. "Wild ducks, you know! 'Quack-Quack!' A—a sporting camp!" His whole face was suddenly alight.
"O-h! And this little Mrs. Kendrue does not sport," reflected Solvei. In another instant her own face was all alight too. "Oh, of what a nonsense!" she laughed. "Of what a silliness! It is of course a mistake, most funny, most conflictable! In some way it is that the gifts should get mixed in the mails!"
"Oh, no!" wagged the Young Doctor's head. "Oh, no!" he reiterated with some emphasis. "Careless as I assure you many of the post-offices are there is very little likelihood of a grand piano and a duck blind getting mixed in the mails."
"O-h," subsided the Norse girl, but only for an instant. "What my idea should be," she resumed cheerfully, "and what the idea of my aunt should be, is that if you would let us take the piano—one month, two months, 107three, we would in return give you some lessons in this music, either in the piano or of the vocal."
"U-m-m," said the Young Doctor, "Yes—yes, of course that would undoubtedly be very humanizing and all that, but with so much unexpected competition, as it were, one must move very,—er—slowly in the matter. Just what—just what would be your idea, Mrs. Kendrue?" he turned and asked quite abruptly.
"My idea?" flushed the little widow. "Why—why, of course I didn't have any idea because I didn't even know that you possessed the piano until just now. But if you are still willing to part with it after—after the estate is settled," she hurried with evident emotion, "why, then—perhaps—I—" Yearningly as she spoke she stepped forward to the piano and fingered out one chord after another, soft, vibrant, experimental, achingly minor, a timid, delicate nature's whole unconscious appeal to life for help, love, tenderness.
"Dear me!" mused the Young Doctor.
"Oh! Do you play?" cried Solvei Kjelland ecstatically. 108
"Oh, no," deprecated the little widow. "I just sing. Do you sing?" she in turn demanded as though her very heart jumped with the question.
"Oh, no," said Solvei Kjelland, "I just play." Yearningly she in turn stepped forward and struck a single chord. But there was nothing soft or minor about this one chord. Sharp, clear, stirring as a clarion call it rang out through the dingy room.
"Oh, dear!" thought the Young Doctor.
And as though flaming then and there with the musical fervor so long suppressed the Norse girl swung impetuously round upon her companion. "You do not play! And I do not sing! So let us!" she cried excitedly and dropping down on the piano stool seemed literally melting her fluent finger-tips into ivory-key and melody.
Indefinitely for a brilliant, chaotic moment or two, chord heaped upon chord and harmony upon harmony, and then suddenly to the Young Doctor's musically untutored mind it seemed as though the crashing waves of sound were literally parting on either side to let a little tune come through. And such a "pleasant 109familiar tune" he rated it delightedly. He didn't remember that Verdi wrote it. He didn't stop to consider that it was from Trovatore. All he cared was that it was a tune, and a tune that said things, and a tune that always said the same things whether you heard it chopped through a hurdy- gurdy on an asphalt pavement or roared stentoriously by a band at the beach. "Home to our Mountains!" was what it said, and oh, other things too, undoubtedly, but that was all that really mattered, "Home to our Mountains!"
It was perfectly evident, though, that the little widow cared who wrote it, and what it was from, and where it was going to! With thrilling sweetness, astonishing technique, and most amazing volume, her rich contralto voice rang suddenly through the room. And in the precipitous jump of his heart was it any wonder that the poor Young Doctor couldn't have told for the life of him whether the mischief was all in one girl's voice or another girl's finger-tips, or partly in the voice and partly in the finger-tips—or—? "Home to our Mountains," soared the lovely voice, then quivered suddenly, like some wounded thing, 110and with her hands pressed tightly to her cheek, the little singer sank weakly down in the first chair she could reach.
"Why, what is it!" jumped the Young Doctor.
Through a haze of tears the dark eyes lifted to his. "Oh, nothing special," faltered the little singer. "Just everything!"
With an irrelevant crash of chords Solvei Kjelland swung sharply round from the piano.
"Who is this Mrs. Tome Gallien, anyways?" she demanded fiercely. "And where is her habit? And what good is she? To hold back from people thus the things they want and stuff them all choke-up with what they don't want,—it is a scandal I say! It is a monstrosity!" With a quick, jerky sort of defiance she rose to her feet and commenced straightening her blue hat and tightening up her blue collar. "I am a failure as One Adventure," she laughed. "And I also get nothing! Neither the piano, nor the medicine for the sick aunt. Give me the address of this woman," she demanded. "And I will write to her in my leisure and tell her what my thoughts of her should be!" 111
"Do!" urged the Young Doctor. "Nothing would please her more! When a woman has the ego that Mrs. Tome Gallien has there's nothing in the world that tickles her vanity so as to hear just what people think of her, be it good, bad, or indifferent." With deliberate malice he tore a leaf from his notebook, scribbled the desired address on it and handed it to the Norse girl. "If it doesn't do anything else," he commended her with mock gravity, "it may at least draw the fire!"
"'Draw the fire'?" repeated the Norse girl a bit perplexedly. Then as though to shrug all perplexity aside she turned suddenly to the young widow. "As for you—" she beamed. "You are a cunning little thing! And I loves you!" With unmistakable tenderness she stooped and kissed the astonished little singer on the forehead. "And I hope you will soon be of a perfect wellness," she coaxed. "And sing the perfectly whole songs to whatever piano it is that you should love the best! As for me?" she called briskly to the Young Doctor. "It is that you understand I am perfectly resigned?" 112
"Resigned to what?" frowned the Young Doctor.
"Oh, this language!" laughed Solvei. "Do you know your own words? To? Of? It is the from that I would say! Complete from the Adventure I am resigned!"
"S-s-h! S-sh!" warned the Young Doctor's frowning face once more. Almost anxiously he accompanied her to the door. "S-sh—s-s-h!" he implored her. "The poor little girl must never know of Mrs. Tome Gallien's audacity in sending her here as an 'Adventure.' With all the sorrow she's in just now, and the pain—"
"Yes, quite so," acquiesced Solvei Kjelland with perfect docility. Then all of a blue-blonde flutter in the open doorway she turned to call back her blithe "Good-by."
"Good-by, Doctor and Mrs. Kendrue!" she called. "What? No?" she flushed at the very evident consternation in both uplifted faces. "Good-by then, Mrs. and Doctor Kendrue!" she revised her adieus hastily. "What? N-o?" she flared with her first real sign of impatience. "Well then, good-by, Mrs. and not Doctor Kendrue!" she finished 113triumphantly, and vanished into the snowstorm. Turning back to his somber office and his sad little patient it seemed suddenly to the Young Doctor as though the first blue bird had fled, leaving only a single black iris bud to presage spring for the garden. "Blue birds were darlings!" quickened the Young Doctor. "And yet?" Poignantly to his memory revived a misty May time years and years ago when he had sat cross-legged in the grass a whole day through—to watch the unfolding miracle of a black iris bud!
In consideration of the particular speed and energy which Solvei Kjelland applied that afternoon to her homeward plunge through jostling traffic and resonant subways it is of interest to note that the first thing she did on reaching her room was to sit right down in her Larkspur-Blue coat and hat and investigate the word "leisure" in her English Dictionary. Out of all the various definitions given, "vacancy of mind" seemed to suit her fancy best. "In the vacancy of my mind is it that I have promised for this writing?" she questioned. "Of a very good wellness then! 114When else should my mind or my heart be more vacated than now?"
True to this impulse she sat down that very evening to tell Mrs. Tome Gallien just exactly what she thought of her. On some very pale, pale yellow note paper, with the blue ink which she adored, and in the spirited handwriting so characteristic of her nationality, the very page was a blonde flare of personality.
MRS. TOME GALLIEN,
DEAREST MADAM (she wrote):
How do you do's. And I know all! Do not do it, I say. Do not do it. They do not like it and if you so persist in thus teasing of them you will most certainly defeat the one object which I am of an inclination to suspect that you have tucked away in one side of the mind. Is it not so?
You are of course very clever and of much wealthiness and some pain. And, it is of course very diverting and most droll lying thus to plan how one may yet motivate the destinies, is it, that you say?
And it is doubtless as you well think—the little widow lady has mourned too long, and 115is too delicate of the indoors, and moons too much over the singing-voice. And this Young Doctor in his own turn he also is a mistake, so sarcasms, so severe, and hates all womans and all pianos both, except for minutes. And you have thought that if thus across the little pain in the lady's bone these two could be brought to scold about the pianos and the blind ducks much good might yet come and of a most loving adjustingment?
But no, Madam it is a great mistake! These people are not at all as bright as you think. And also in their hearts is there none of that most happy greed which makes all comical things as they come one joke! No! It is only that they see in your gifts one great make-them-mad which if you persist in so doing with other comics will make them cold with hate and humiliation for each other. And when you tag the poor little lady as an Adventure you have yet outraged complete the chivalries of the Young Doctor so that he cannot even see in his sense that even so little a widow may yet be a very great Adventure.
Do not do it, I say! Do not do it! It is 116cruel. And there is no law but your own honor that can stop it.
If the malice is so formed that you cannot stop it but must persist in this most foolish custom of giving people the things what they do not want I would respectfully suggest that you send them to me.
I am young. I am strong. And very laughing. If you can find anything in the world at just this time that I do not want I dare you to send it to me!
Yours very truly,
SOLVEI KJELLAND.
Being satiate then with justice and the English language Solvei reverted once more to the pursuit of juvenile pedagogics and the general discussion of human events with her own aunt and in her own tongue.
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, nothing except pedagogics and the aunt even remotely threatened her horizon. And by Thursday every gesture of her fine young body, every changing expression of her fine young face, seemed frankly indicative of some seething inner triumph that as yet remained 117unspoken. By Friday night, however, even this self-control slipped its leash, and she closed her eyes for sleep with a very distinct and definite expression of emotion. "Ah!" she laughed, "that Gallien lady down yonder is good and fixed! Yes!"
It was not until Saturday night, late, by special delivery, that Mrs. Tome Gallien's answer came.
Stumbling sleepily down the stairs just be fore midnight to answer the doorbell that no one else seemed awake to answer, Solvei Kjelland received the insignificant looking envelope into her own hands. Small as it was, heavily overshadowed by special delivery postage, and almost quaveringly directed in a pale, fine writing it might well have suggested to anybody a suppliant for mercy, or at least for pity.
With a first faint twinge of remorse Solvei tore it open to discover no contents whatever—except a railroad ticket to the little mainland town in South Carolina where Mrs. Tome Gallien had established her official address.
Scowlingly for a moment and in dumb perplexity the girl stood shifting from one slippered 118foot to another in a really desperate effort to decipher each word, phrase, comma, asterisk, in the momentous little document be fore her. Then quite suddenly a smile that was by no means mirthful flashed brilliantly across her blue eyes and her gleaming teeth.
"Stinged!" said Solvei Kjelland, and gathering her big gray blanket wrapper a little bit closer around her fled back precipitously to her bed.
With the first faint ray of morning light perhaps she might have waked to an instant's reassuring conviction that the whole ticket episode was a dream if only her subconscious deductions from that episode had not waked first on her lips like a wry taste. "The one things in the world that I did not want—at just this time? That lady is a witchess!" was the phrase that waked on her lips.
It was not until early the following week, however, that she called up the Young Doctor to tell him the news.
"How do you do?" she telephoned. "This is Solvei Kjelland. And I am to say good-by."
"Good-by? Why, what do you mean?" 119questioned the Young Doctor's frankly surprised voice.
"It is that I am going away," said Solvei, "on a little—what it is you would call a trip."
"Oh," said the Young Doctor. "Where?"
If the statement could ever be made that a Person "shrugged" his voice Solvei certainly "shrugged" hers.
"Oh, through the tunnel!" she said. "And then off!"
"Yes, but where?" persisted the Young Doctor.
"Oh, to the Southern Carolines to visit this Mrs. Tome Gallien," sing-songed the girl as one who had rehearsed the line even to the point of monotony.
"What?" cried the Young Doctor. "Why—why, what do you mean?"
"Mean?" bridled Solvei instantly. "For why should it be a meanness? Is not this Mrs. Tome Gallien as fine a lady as I? Am I not as fine a lady as Mrs. Tome Gallien? For why if two ladies like to visit it should not be so? Have I not explain it all to the sick aunt?" 120
"Yes, but do you really mean that you wrote to Mrs. Tome Gallien?" stammered the Young Doctor. "What did you say? For Heaven's sake what did you say?"
"What I did say should be sealed in my own heart," affirmed Solvei with some coldness.
"Yes, but my dear child!" protested the Young Doctor. "You don't seem to have any idea of just what you're going to! It's not at all a cheerful sort of place you understand. Why even its name you know is 'Gloom of the Sea.'"
"Even so," said Solvei, "there is no special pain in that. In my time have I not already seen several Glooms of the Land? Why then should I not, for sheer geography, start out to investigate a 'Gloom of the Sea'?"
"Yes, but it's a—it's a Desert Island, you know!" persisted the Young Doctor.
"So-o?" brightened Solvei. "And will there then be camels? N-o?" With a soft sigh of regret her whole personality seemed to fade for a moment into the indeterminate blur and buzz of crossed telephone wires. Then clear as a bell her voice rang out again. 121"And have you seen the little sad lady once more?" she asked.
"Why she's here in my office now," said the Young Doctor. "She has to come almost every day."
"So?" mused the Norse girl. "And will it take the long time perhaps to mend the little pain in the bone?"
"I certainly hope so!" laughed the Young Doctor. And for the first time since she had heard it there was no irony in the laugh but sheer boyish happiness.
"You do not seem quite to get the ideas of this little trip that I should make," she reproached him briskly. "It is not just that I go! But that I stay! It is not just for the once it would seem but for the all time that this lady so desires me! The ticket that she so kindly sends is but one-sided. It does not return."
"Ticket?" exclaimed the Young Doctor. "Why, this is preposterous! You don't really mean it, surely? There's nothing that can make you go, you know!"
"So?" said Solvei. "Did I not make the dare to her? Should I not pay? Is it not 122then as you say? I have drawn the fire!" Across the astonishing gravity of her tone a most joyous laugh broke suddenly. "Your words are of such a mixedness," she laughed. "Drawn? Drawn? Is it not rather as the strong banks would say, Miss Solvei Kjelland by one lady from the South has been withdrawn from the circulations? But I adore this America!" she confided blithely. "Always around every corner there is something that you did not first expect when you curled that corner."
"Yes, I know," admitted the Young Doctor. "But what about all this Montessori study and everything? Are you going to chuck it? And the little brother? The little lad who isn't?" he asked with real regret.
"It will all keep," said Solvei. "It is only what is, it would seem, that should pass."
"Oh, but Miss Kjelland," insisted the Young Doctor, "this whole thing is absurd! I—I believe you're making it all up, just for a joke! If you're going to be home next Sunday afternoon couldn't I come around and—and laugh the thing out with you?"
"Next Sunday afternoon?" mused Solvei, 123with the manner of one who pauses for an instant to count the days on the fingers. "And this now, this minute, is a Tuesday?" she questioned, still speculatively.
"Yes," agreed the Young Doctor.
"No! It will not be possible!" said Solvei. "I leave!"
"Yes, but when?" asked the Young Doctor.
"Now," said Solvei. "Already it is that I can hear the taxicab adding at the door."
"What?" cried the Young Doctor.
"Under the river!" waved Solvei's clear young voice. "Under the river, Dr. Sam Kendrue!"
Like a gigantic gray-brown wonder bulb the northern winter is dumped down thus at will into the sunny, plushy forcing frame of a New York Pullman to bloom in perfect scent and glory only one day, two days, three days later in some welcoming Southland.
If Solvei Kjelland was astonished, however, at the first bland sights that met her blizzard-habituated eyes it is only fair to say that Mrs. 124Tome Gallien in all her years of experience in every kind of a Southland had never seen any thing that astonished her as much as the sight of Solvei Kjelland.
Fuming helplessly in her great mahogany bed with its weird- carven bed-posts of pirate and sailor and siren, the sick woman lay staring blankly from the ceiling to the piazza railing and from the piazza railing to the dull gray sea when the vision first burst upon her.
"Why—why—Martha!" she screamed to her deaf woman. "There is a bright blue girl in the wrangle boat! And nobody is wrangling! They are coming right along, I mean! Scudding! And the girl is running the engine!"
From her own quick glance at the scene the deaf woman's answering voice came back as calm, as remote, as de- magnetized as the voice of an old letter.
"You sent for a girl to come, I believe," said the deaf woman.
"Yes, I know," fumed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But I hardly dreamed for a moment that she really would!" 125
"What?" said the deaf woman.
"Never—dreamed—that—she—would!" repeated Mrs. Tome Gallien as economically as she could.
"Most things that you send for—seem to come," monotoned the deaf woman by no means unamiably. "There's no room left in the storeroom now for the last box of Japanese bric-a-brac, or the French wedding gown or the new-fangled fireless cooker. Where shall we put the girl?"
"In the fireless cooker!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien.
From the vague acquiescent smile on Martha's face it was evident that she sensed the spirit if not the words of the suggestion.
The next direction however was startlingly clear. With a quite unmistakable gesture Mrs. Tome Gallien pointed toward the stairs.
"Martha! Go to it!" she screamed.
To a person lying in bed voices travel so much quicker than do the owners of the voices. Through what seemed an eternity then of time and noise, boat-keels grounding, men grumbling, boys shouting, women chattering, the sick woman waited in the lonely hush of her immediate surroundings with a very perceptible shiver of nervousness flashing from moment to moment across her spine. 126
As coolly as if she had been appraising a new dog or pussy, Mrs. Tome Gallien narrowed her eyes to both the vision and the announcement
Then all a-glow and a-blow and theatrically incongruous like some splendid young Viking of Old rigged out in a girl's blue and ultramodern rain-coat, the stranger loomed up suddenly at the foot of the bed with Martha's portly white figure backgrounding every radiant flutter and line of the blue and gold silhouette.
"I am come!" said Solvei Kjelland.
As coolly as if she had been appraising a new dog or pussy Mrs. Tome Gallien narrowed her eyes to both the vision and the announcement.
"Certainly you are a very good-looking young person!" she conceded at last. "But of such an ungodly name! Is there no way to overcome it?"
"Over—come it?" puzzled Solvei for a single shadowed instant. "Oh, that is most easy," she brightened, almost at once. "Solway it is as though it was. And Ch-Chelland."
"You may call me 'Elizabeth,'" said Mrs. 129Tome Gallien without the flicker of an eyelash.
"E-lee-sa-buth?" repeated the girl painstakingly.
"Oh, I suppose that will do," sighed Mrs. Tome Gallien, struggling up a little bit higher on her pillows. "But whatever in the world made you come?" she demanded tartly.
But if the question was like a dash of cold water, Solvei's reaction to it was at least the reaction of a duck's back.
"You mean you did not really want me?" she preened and fluttered. Her voice was ecstasy, her eyes like stars.
"I certainly did not," sliced Mrs. Tome Gallien's clear incisive voice.
"Oh, of what a joyousness and retribution!" beamed Solvei. "Of what a gloriosity! As the shooting camping is to the sad little lady, and the piano to the Young Doctor,—so thus am I to you! What then shall happen to everyone of us is yet on the lap of the gods! Let us kiss!" she suggested as one prize fighter might proffer his hand to another.
"I am not a kisser, thank you," said Mrs. Tome Gallien with some coldness. 130
"So-o?" acquiesced the girl softly. If her spirit faltered for an instant, her blue eyes fortunately faltered no lower than the great clutter of boxes that flanked Mrs. Gallien's bed in every direction. "For why are there so many boxes?" she looked up suddenly to ask with a smile that would have disarmed a Tartar.
"Why—why those are just some things I've been buying lately," relaxed Mrs. Tome Gallien ever so slightly. "There isn't so very much to do here, some days, except just to read the advertisements in the back of the magazines—and send for things. Martha hates it!" she added with a sudden wry glance at Martha's impassive face.
"O-h!" said Solvei. And the word was divided absolutely evenly between praise of the boxes and disparagement of Martha.
The boxes seemed to have heard their part of it anyway. The string on a huge brown paper package burst suddenly as though for sheer excitement.
"Martha will show you to your room," said Mrs. Tome Gallien quite imperviously. "And whatever else you try to jar, pray don't waste 131 your energies trying to jar Martha. By a most merciful dispensation of Providence her sensibilities have been wrapped in a cotton batting silence for the past twenty years. You may in time learn to understand me," she smiled faintly with her first kindness. "But you will never understand Martha. Come back to me after supper, if you wish. And wear something blue if you have it. I like you in blue."
It was long after supper when Solvei returned. But at least she was in blue, and a very neat and trim blue it was and essentially boyish with its soft collar rolling back sailor- wise from her slender throat. Like one fairly consumed with the winter novelty of boats and beaches, too full of a hundred new excitements to speak, she dropped down on the low footstool by Mrs. Tome Gallien's pungent, smoky, lightwood fire, and with her blue elbows on her blue knees and her white chin cupped in her white hands, sat staring wide-eyed at her hostess. The whole breathless significance of youth was in her face. Youth struggled eternally for its own best 132self-expression. But when she spoke, a single sentence only burst from her lips.
"What was in that big brown bundle-box that should burst so?" she asked with a sudden elfish impudence.
But instead of being annoyed by the question, Mrs. Tome Gallien seemed on the contrary to be rather amused with it.
"You like boxes?" she asked with a faintly quizzical lift of her eyebrows.
"Boxes?" flamed Solvei. "It is like the new day! When the string breaks—it is the dawn! 'What should there then be in it?' jumps the heart. What is there yet that will come?"
"Oh, dear me," smiled Mrs. Tome Gallien. "If you feel like that about it by all means come and open it. I forget myself what is in it, there are so many. Nuts maybe," she laughed, "or a new carpet sweeper. Or a sable muff even!"
With all the frank eagerness of a child Solvei Kjelland jumped up to investigate the mystery, and like a kitten snarling itself into worsteds disappeared for the moment 133into interminable pale-colored tissue papers, only to emerge at last brandishing on high the plumpest, gaudiest, altogether most hideous hand-embroidered sofa pillow that human eyes were ever forced to contemplate.
"It is not nuts," said Solvei Kjelland. In another moment she had clasped the pillow to her breast. "Oh, of what a horror!" she laughed. "And how beloved! Is it the work then," she demanded, "of a blind one? Or of one crazy? Or of one both blind and crazy?" Back of the laughter and the question was a sincere and unmistakable concern.
"A clergyman's widow makes them," confided Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Somebody over in Alabama,—I saw the advertisement in a country newspaper. I take a whole lot of country newspapers for just that sort of amusement," she added a bit drily. "There seems to be such an everlasting number of bunglers in the world who are trying so desperately hard to make a little money. This woman I believe is trying to send her boy to college."
With the pillow extended precipitously to full arm's length Solvei sat for a moment 134staring from the chaotic embroidery to Mrs. Tome Gallien's perfectly composed face.
"Could a boy come to any of the good that should go to college on a pillow like that?" she demanded uproariously, while all the laughing curves of her mouth seemed reaching suddenly up to fend off the threat of tears in her eyes. Once again she clasped the pillow to her breast. "Oh, the bridge that it does make into the other's life!" she cried. "Can you not see all at once, the house, the desolation, the no store anywhere with fine goods to compare with! The boy so thin, so white, so eager perhaps, so watching of every stitch! That most dreadful magenta? Will there be by the grace of the good God a chance perhaps for the Latin? That screaming oranges? Should it be humanly possible that so much joys as histories and boots might yet be in the same world with the Latin. And the mother? So pricked with needles? So consumed with hopings——"
"You—you see it, do you?" drawled Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"See it?" flamed Solvei. "I am it!" With the gesture of one who sought suddenly 135to hide her emotion she swung around abruptly toward the other side of the room. "What else is there then?" she asked, all laughter and mischief again. "That box so wooden, so busted at the top? Is that also a bridge to some other livings?"
"If you choose to call it so," nodded Mrs. Tome Gallien. A frankly quizzical invitation to explore was in the nod.
Solvei certainly needed no urging. In another instant down on her knees before the great wooden box, she was slowly extracting from wads of excelsior, piece after piece of the most exquisitely delicate and transparent turquoise blue china beaded in gold and airily overwrought with soaring sea gulls. There was a big breakfast cup, and a middle-sized breakfast cup, and a big plate, and a middle-sized plate, and a cereal saucer and another cereal saucer, and a most stately little coffee pot and all the other attendants and attendants to attendants which Fashion assigns to just that sort of a service.
"Oh, it is for the fairies then?" gasped Solvei. "Or a Princess?" Deftly as she spoke she pulled a great white sheet of paper 136 to her and spread it on the floor as a cloth. "No!" she quickened. "It is for lovers! See? The first breakfast of the new home?" As cautiously as though she had been handling butterfly wings she began to dramatize the scene, the big plate there, the middle-sized plate here, a man's elbow-room, thus, a woman's daintiness, so! In the ingenuousness of her own visualization she lifted the bride's cup to her lips and sipped an ecstatic draught from it.
"Mocha or Java?" mocked Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"Joy!" said Solvei Kjelland.
In a sudden fit of abstraction then the girl struggled slowly to her knees and knelt thus staring very thoughtfully all around her.
"So is it then with all these boxes?" she asked. "That from this desert island lying so you would make constantly such little bridges across to other people's livings? In time, it is, I mean, as soon as you should bear to part with them you would build even these most Heavenish dishes across to some young happiness? But will such a young happiness ever take the troubles to cross back to you?" 137she demanded with sudden fierceness. "That is it, I say! That is it! A prattling note perhaps? A praise-you for being so rich? But do they ever yet write more late to tell that the gift is still well, that it has made new joy that very morning perhaps, that even yet after one month, six months, twenty, it is still so dear?"
"They never have," admitted Mrs. Tome Gallien.
In utter irrelevance the girl sank back on her heels and crossing her arms on her breast began to rock herself joyously to and fro.
"Oh, I do love this place so!" she confided. "I do love it so! And if you should then keep me," she beamed. "And I should be quite pleasant,—there is a lawn mower I read in yesterday's paper! Most wonderful it is, and runs by the gasolene, so that all one needs to do is to follow singing gaily. Could you send for such?"
"A lawn mower?" sniffed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "You noticed, I trust, that there was no nice grass whatsoever on this island?"
"Yes, that is most so," admitted Solvei. "Neither equally is there any young 138happinesses or bare-toed boys making for Latin. But if we were possessed of such a lawn mower and its wonderfulness we could at least make the fine green lawns in the mind."
"Solvei!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien, "I am dreadfully afraid that I am going to like you! But before I actually commit myself," she frowned, "I want to ask you one question. Are you in the habit of letting strange young men kiss you?"
"What?" jumped Solvei.
Very significantly Mrs. Tome Gallien repeated the question. "Strange young men?" she revised it. "Are you in the habit of letting strange young men kiss you?"
"Oh!" flushed Solvei. "It is then the Young Doctor that you mean? Was it so that he thus confessed it to you?" she questioned a bit bewilderedly. "So shamed he was, so worried, I had not just thought that he should tell. Yes, it is as you say he is one most strange young man."
"Yes, but you?" persisted Mrs. Tome Gallien. "How did you feel about it? That's what I want to know!"
"How should I feel?" laughed Solvei. 139"Why it was so mad I was, so strong, I could have crushed him on the steps! And then suddenly I see his face! Bah!" shrugged Solvei. "I have one father and nine brothers and all the world is most full of men! It is not from such a face as the Young Doctor's that any evil should come. It is just as I have said, one very sad accident!"
"It does not seem to be just the sadness of the accident that lingers longest in your mind," drawled Mrs. Tome Gallien.
With her chin tip-tilted and her eyes like stars the girl met the sarcasm without a flicker of resentment.
"No!" she laughed. "It is not the sadness of the accident that remains longest in the mind!"
"U-m-mmmm," mused Mrs. Tome Gallien. "All the same," she resumed with sharpness, "I certainly think it was most cruel, most brutal of him, not to make the trip down here with me! It would have done him good," she insisted. "Just the mere balmy change of it! He is so grim!"
"Oh, but he cannot help the being grim," flared Solvei. "He is so poor and so wanting 140things! How should he yet achieve them except by sticking close to that most saddest of all truths that the only ways to get ahead is to stay behind and attend to one's business?"
"Solvei!" asked Mrs. Tome Gallien quite abruptly. "Have you gotten the impression in any way that the Young Doctor was— was attracted at all to my little widow friend?"
"Oh, of a surety!" attested Solvei. "He is I think what one would say 'crazy' of her."
"Oh, I hardly dare to hope that," mused Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But of course—" In some far-away speculation the sentence faded suddenly off into silence. "She will of course be very rich some day, I suppose," she resumed a bit haughtily. "I shall, I suppose, make her my heir."
"S-o?" said Solvei Kjelland.
"Solvei!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien with another spurt of abruptness. "Speaking of 'attending to one's business,' if you should decide to stay here and make me your business, what do you think you could do for me?"
"Oh, I could do the reading aloud," brightened Solvei instantly. "And I could thus open the boxes! And I could run the wrangle 141boat!" she quickened and glowed. "And also if it should so seem best I could scrub the blue flannel crockings from the Wrangle Boy's neck!"
"On the whole—as a really steady employment," conceded Mrs. Tome Gallien, "suppose we begin on the reading aloud. I adore being read to."
"Oh, I am very fine on this reading aloud!" preened Solvei. "So dramatic is it that you say? So intensed?" With absolute self-assurance she picked up the only book in reach, it happened to be the "Golden Treasury," and just out of sheer temperamental eagerness selected the biggest-looking poem she could find. "It should be an 'Ode,' is it that you call it?" she confided. "And it is about—about—? I do not know such words," she faltered for a single second only and passed the page to Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"Oh," said Mrs. Tome Gallien, "Wordsworth, you mean. 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.'"
"S-o?" conceded Solvei. "All that? It is not certainly of a poetry sound but 142more—later perhaps it will tell. All the rest is most easy looking.
"There was—some time" (she began) "when—when
meadows, groves, also streams,
"The earth and all things perfectly—ordinary
"To me did—did seems
"Ap-pareled—" I do not know that word and
here is another—" in ce—les—tial lightings,
"The——"
"Yes—anybody could see at once that you are a remarkable reader!" slashed Mrs. Tome Gallien's coolest, thinnest voice. "The picture it suggests of our long spring evenings together is——"
With a startled glance upward Solvei detected for the first time the actual glinting mockery in the older woman's eyes. "What is it?" she stammered. "What?" Still like some one more bewildered than hurt she struggled to her feet. "Even as from the first," she questioned, "is it that you are making the sport of me when I wish so hard to do 143the things that would please you? Through and through, is your heart then so cruel?" she demanded, "that it must make mockerings of the confused and the far-from-homes?"
"Oh, Solvei!" cried the older woman suddenly. "Smile again! Laugh again! I can't bear it! It's as though the sun had died! It's as though the moon had gone! If you are angry and leave me, I shall be left all alone again with just the fog and the sea! I am a brute, and I know it! But oh, if you will only just smile again! Even just once, I mean! Oh, my poor dear little girl," she implored her. "Oh, my poor dear touchy little blonde girl!"
"I am not a 'poor—poor little blonde girl,'" asserted Solvei with some spirit. "I am indeed as I said, very young, very strong. And very laughing," she insisted without even the remotest flicker of a smile.
"Are you young enough and strong enough and laughing enough to come over here and sit on my bed?" rallied Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"I am young enough and strong enough 144and laughing enough to do anything!" said Solvei Kjelland.
Stiff and stern as a ramrod she went over and sat on the side of the Sick Woman's bed.
Without an atom of self-consciousness or embarrassment both women began all over again to study each other's faces.
"Could I put my hand on your yellow hair?" asked Mrs. Gallien at last quite surprisingly.
"You could put your hand on my yellow hair," said Solvei.
"If I should apologize fairly decently for existing at all," experimented Mrs. Tome Gallien a little further, "would you be willing to kiss now?
"I should never be willing," sighed Solvei, "to kiss any lips that tasted of mockerings."
"What would you be willing to do?" ventured Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"What would you want me to do?" relaxed Solvei ever so slightly.
Through Mrs. Tome Gallien's busy brain a dozen possible answers tested themselves one against the other. 145
"Well, would you be willing to—to tell me a little story?" she chose as the most promising one.
"Tell you a little story?" queried Solvei. Once again her whole face darkened with suspicion.
"Yes, about my little island," hurried Mrs. Tome Gallien. "It was dark when I came and they put me right into this bed. I do not leave my bed, you know."
"What?" quivered Solvei. "This most beautiful little island, you have not seen it—since you came?" In the very tensity of the question all the blue seemed to surge back suddenly to her eyes, all the pink to her cheeks. "Why of a sureness," she cried, "will I tell you about this little island!" Softly then for a moment she patted her skirts and recrossed her slippered feet and fumbled with the big silk tie that closed her collar. Then quite geographically she began her narrative. "First of all," she explained, "it is a round little island."
"Really, you surprise me," said Mrs. Tome Gallien purely automatically. "So many islands are square." 146
"And there are fish upon it!" glowed the narrator.
"Oh, surely not upon it?" shivered Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"And there are seven monstrous what you call 'live-oak' trees dripping with gray beards,—it is most terrible," gloated the narrator. "And in one tree alone have I seen with my own eyes seven most scarlet birds and two blue birds. And in yet another tree there is a fine snake.—And all along by what you should call the edge of the porch blue violets are coming. And on the roof where the wrangle boat sleeps there is an green vine that shall yet be yellow and sweet, Martha tells. And—and—" Around the corners of the girl's red lips a faint little smile showed suddenly. "And there is one little black pig, so grunting!" she announced with rapture. "And—and——"
So the sweet, eager, revitalizing young voice ran on till Martha herself appeared to announce Sleeping Time, and Mrs. Tome Gallien whose "sleeping time" for years had been a farce of ghost and specter dozed off before she was even half undressed to dream like a child 147of budding violets and flitting birds and a glow that should be of jessamine instead of gold.
Hours fall so easily out of a day, days out of a week, weeks out of a month!
The jessamine glow did come in its own good time as did also various other things which Nature had ordained, March winds, March rains, March tides, March sunshine.
Other wonders came too that were of course Mrs. Tome Gallien's ordaining rather than Nature's fabulous shoppings from all the big marts of the world, and little pitiful, home made products from backwoods settlement or lonely prairie.
Once and for all time relieved of the hazardous task of reading aloud to a capricious invalid, Solvei came and went like a young Sea Breeze, whistling through the halls, singing through the rooms, sweeping across the island, frolicking on the water. If it was fair to rate her as a rather exceptionally clever and daring young navigator on the sea of fact it was only fair to acknowledge her equally clever, equally daring in the realms of fancy. Smiling knowingly into Martha's silences, laughing at the wrangle boat man or boy, waving a slim hand 148 in and out of Mrs. Tome Gallien's narrow sea-blue vista, scudding to and from the mainland on interminable errands, or curled up for long cozy evenings on the foot of Mrs. Tome Gallien's bed to visualize their mutual magic path across one new box or another into "other people's livings," Solvei Kjelland as a companion was frankly a success.
Then one day very late in March, or even the first of April, something came which was partly of Nature's ordaining and partly of Mrs. Tome Gallien's, though most thoroughly a surprise to the latter one concerned.
It was a letter from Dr. Sam Kendrue. And very Northern. Whatever the New York winter had been it was plainly evident that the New York spring was still exceedingly cold.
MRS. TOME GALLIEN,
DEAR MADAM (said the letter):
As it seems best to me at just this time that Mrs. Kendrue should supplement her treatment with a trip South, it is my intention to accompany her. In view of this fact I will take the liberty of calling upon you on Tuesday 149next. Trusting that your island experience has proved beneficial to your health,
I am, Yours truly, etc., etc.
"U-m-mmmm," smiled Mrs. Tome Gallien. But before the dull, fretted bewilderment in Solvei Kjelland's face, her smile sharpened suddenly into impatience. "Why surely, Solvei," she scolded. "With all your English you might at least understand that."
"N-o," shifted Solvei from one slim ankle to the other. "It does not seem to me of any understanding whatever—whether it should be Dr. Sam Kendrue's Mrs. Kendrue who comes or just Mrs. Kendrue's Mrs. Kendrue?"
"O-h, of course," rallied Mrs. Tome Gallien's good nature. "One could hardly expect them to be married by now, or even engaged perhaps. But at least they must be awfully interested! How about your poor hardworking young doctor now?" she gloated; "couldn't take the tiniest holiday for a poor old gray-haired, crippled creature like me! But has got time to burn when it comes to some little soft dark-eyed thing with a creak in her singing-voice!" 150
"Love is sure some pranks," admitted Solvei.
"A prank," corrected Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"A prank," repeated Solvei with perfect docility.
From the increasing sweetness of her day dreams Mrs. Tome Gallien turned idly to the calendar on the table by her bedside. The week's page had not been torn off, nor the week before that, if the whole truth must be known.
"Why, Good Lack!" she jerked suddenly. "To-day is Tuesday!"
"So?" jumped Solvei.
Both women turned simultaneously toward the clock.
"It will take you half an hour to make the mainland and that train!" cried Mrs. Tome Gallien. "And for goodness sake, brush your hair! And change those old sea-faring clothes."
"I will not brush the hair," tossed Solvei's bright wind- blown head. "Always it is my preference to wear it thus hither-and-hang! Nor will I part ever from my friend this old blue jersey! And even so—if the sun does 151not fade between the here and the mainland I may yet achieve three new freckles on my nose!"
"Don't argue!" fumed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Just hurry!"
"It is only when one hurries that one has time to argue," persisted the girl.
"Oh, stop your nonsense!" ordered Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"Whose nonsense will then be left to us?" flared Solvei. "But do not thus make all this extra worrisome," she admonished with sudden gentleness. "Time is always more fat than you think! But for two such fancy fine packages as I go now to fetch," she flared again ever so slightly, "there will not be room also in the boat for the face of the wrangle boat man nor yet for the legs of the boy. It is alone I insist that I should go!"
"For mercy's sake!" fretted Mrs. Tome Gallien. "I don't care how you go, if you'll only go!"
Without further parleying, Solvei started for the stairs. In another minute with a few jumps and slides she had reached the front door. Once outside, it took but a fraction 152more of time to settle the wrangle boat man and boy.
"Sitting here in perfect peace on the shore," she admonished them, "watch thus how one isolated person with no words but oil can make a boat prance on the waves! All aboard!" she called back exultantly to them.
With a chug like a great, pounding heartthrob the wrangle boat sprang for the sea. Just for a moment then at the last signaling point Solvei lifted her hand in unfailing cheeriness to the sick woman and the deaf woman left behind, and turned her own inordinately sharpened young senses toward the mainland.
But when the ructious little wrangle boat drew up a half hour later alongside the dilapidated mainland wharf before an admiring audience of jet black pickaninnies and mangy hounds there was only one passenger waiting impatiently there, and that passenger was Dr. Sam Kendrue.
"How do you do, Dr. Sam Kendrue?" said Solvei.
"How do you do, Miss Solvei Kjelland?" grinned Doctor Kendrue.
With more agility than one might have 153dared to hope for from one who boasted so much winter in his blood, the Young Doctor snatched up his valise, jumped down into the wrangle boat and pushed off.
To avoid running into a sunken rowboat and a floating snag, Solvei was compelled to start her engine, and turn sharply out to sea.
"Where then is your Mrs. Kendrue?" she called a bit breathlessly above the lap of wind and water.
"It is my Mrs. Kendrue that I have come to get!" said the Young Doctor.
With a little oil can poised abruptly in midair, Solvei opened the same old bewildered blue eyes at him.
"Oh, no," she hastened to disillusion him. "Your Mrs. Kendrue is not yet on our island."
"No, of course she isn't," laughed the Young Doctor. "And there's a jolly good reason why, and the reason is—because she's right here in the boat!"
"What?" stammered Solvei. With frenzied haste she began very suddenly to oil everything in reach. "What?" she repeated vaguely.
"I mean just what I say," said the Young 154Doctor, and made a slight move as of one who would cross one cramped knee over the other.
With all the joy of a foreigner easing his dictional panic with an idiom, Solvei snatched out at the first phrase she could think of that had a familiar word in it.
"Sit down! You're rocking the boat!" she screamed.
"Silly!" said the Young Doctor. "I was once in a boat before!" Quite wretchedly he began then and there to try and recover his old manner, the irony, the mocking. "Really, Miss Kjelland," he ducked as a great cloud of spray went by him. "Really Miss Kjelland, you're awfully rough with boats! Oh, but Solvei," he broke through again in spite of himself. "You understand what I'm trying to say, now don't you?"
"No, I don't," said Solvei Kjelland with her great blue eyes staring straight ahead through the veil of her windblown hair at some far focal point just over the wrangle boat's prancing bow.
Once again a great cloud of spray missed the Young Doctor by the width only of his dodge. 155
"And how is it then about Mrs. Kendrue's Mrs. Kendrue?" asked Solvei quite suddenly out of the gusty sky.
"Oh!" said the Young Doctor with the most surprising revival of cheerfulness. "Why—why she's gone on down to investigate her new duck blind with the rest of her party. There's a tenor, it seems, who is rather,—well, contenting. You could hardly use any other word with her, she's so awfully inexpressive. Anyway it's a diverting friendship for her, though whether the tenor can hit a high duck as niftily as he can hit a high note, remains of course to be seen."
"S-o?" said Solvei with indifferent interest. "And is the piano well?"
"Oh, fairly well," conceded the Young Doctor. "But if ever I saw a piano that needed a mother's care! I had to board it out, you know?"
"S-o?" crooned Solvei's sweet low voice.
It was astonishing though how soon the sea calmed down after that. At least there was no more spray.
Skirting round at last along the sunny sheltered side of the little island instead of 156splashing boldly up to the regular landing as was her usual custom, it seemed indeed as though Solvei was suddenly trying to feed out serenity to the man before her. The floating gray moss of the live-oak trees was certainly serene, the twitter of birds, the soft, warm drone of insect. Without an interrupting word she drove the boat's nose into a roughly improvised harbor of floating logs and a raft, jumped out upon the raft and beckoned the Young Doctor to follow her.
But at the first soft-padded thud of his foot on the turf it was the Young Doctor himself who broke the vocal silence.
"Oh, but Solvei!" he protested. "You've got to know that you are the only Mrs. Kendrue that I want!"
"S-o?" queried Solvei, glancing back with a vaguely skeptical smile across her blue jersey shoulder.
"Oh, of course," admitted the Young Doc tor, "just right away at the very first I didn't know it perhaps. You were so—so,— well, so sort of unusual," he flushed, "and so awfully independent! About the Adventure and the Little Widow and everything, you 157made it so perfectly plain you didn't need me that it wasn't till you'd actually gone that I half woke up to the fact how much I needed you! Why, Solvei, after you ran away the city was like a gray fog with no light in it, no laughter, no anything! The days were a week long, the nights, a month! Is it any wonder that I should feel as though I'd loved you for almost ever and ever? Why, if it hadn't been for my work, and the knowledge that work and work only could bring me to you—? Oh, I know it's awfully sudden and everything!" he persisted desperately. "But why people prate so everlastingly about 'Love at first sight' and never make any talk at all about 'Love at first absence'! Solvei you've simply got to understand!" he cried out.
In her few steps lead of him the girl stopped suddenly and turned around.
"But of what good is it that I should understand?" she asked with a little appealing gesture of her hands. "In my far Norway is it not that I have still the cause of the little brother? And here?" she puzzled, "How could I yet leave Elizabeth?"
"Elizabeth?" questioned the Young Doctor. 158
"Mrs. Tome Gallien," explained the girl.
"Elizabeth?" repeated the Young Doctor with increasing astonishment. "You mean you are such friends as that?"
"Yes," nodded the girl. "I am such friends as that."
Across the lovely earnestness of her face sun and shadow flickered intermittently. Softly her blue eyes brooded. Her bright gold hair was like a flame. In all that sunny, singing island there was no radiance like her unless perhaps it was the blue bird who flashed through the gray moss just beyond her.
"I cannot leave the little brother," she said. "Nor can I leave the Elizabeth." As though kindled by the spring's own sweet her whole musing face flamed suddenly with joy. "Nor yet.—I am so greedy!" she cried, "nor yet can I leave you!"
All unbeknown then to Mrs. Tome Gallien or even to Martha, they crept up the stairs at last to Mrs. Tome Gallien's room, where with the poor Young Doctor relegated ignominiously behind her, Solvei chose for her own whimsical purposes to make her dramatic entrance. 159
"Good afternoon to you, then, Elizabeth!" she hailed casually to the impatient Sick Woman on the bed. "This of a surety is
'One time when meadows, groves, also streams,
To me—did seems
A—apparelled in celestial lightings!'"
"What?" gasped Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Why, what makes your cheeks so red?" she demanded suddenly.
"I got kissed again," said Solvei.
"What?" snapped Mrs. Tom Gallien.
"They did not come," said Solvei. "No such Kendrues combination as you suggested. Nothing came!" said Solvei. "Except just one big package for me!"
"For you?" frowned Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"For me!" shrugged Solvei. "And though it should be hard yet to tell just what livings it shall lead to—it shall at least lead to much lovings."
"What?" puzzled Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"This is it!" said Solvei, and dragged the Young Doctor into the room.
"What?" screamed Mrs. Tome Gallien. 160
"It is for me! You understand?" beamed the girl.
In the convulsive laughter that overtook the Young Doctor he did not at the moment notice Mrs. Tome Gallien's face.
But there was no laughter of any kind in Mrs. Tome Gallien's face, only shock, and a most furious rage.
"So it is thus you have been deceiving me?" she cried out to Solvei. "All this time that you knew what my heart was fixed on, my hopes, my everything! All this time that you have been here a guest in my house! And quite safe I supposed from any such——"
"Oh, now really, Mrs. Gallien!" interposed the Young Doctor's grimmest, sternest voice.
"Oh, of what a nonsense!" laughed Solvei. "There is no blames anywhere—unless it should be to this Montessori theory! Out of the whole wide world is it not that a child must gravitate to his own wantings? It cannot be chosen for him?"
Then with all the young laughter gone from her face she reached out her slim brown hand to the Young Doctor's reassuring clasp and led him to the bed. 161
"Elizabeth," she said. "You are rich and you are sick and you are sometimes very cross. But you cannot buy the loving! Here then are two children who would love you all your life long— all their lives long. If you thus furiously so refuse the gift, who then is the stingy receiver?"
"What?" stammered Mrs. Tome Gallien. "What?" Across her haggard, rage-stricken face a smile of incredulous enlightenment flickered suddenly. "What?" she surrendered. "You—you—rascals!" And held out her aching arms to them. 162